Child of Fire, "The Dead"

I was pleasantly surprised by Harry Connolly's Child of Fire.  It's a first novel that a few people had told me was worth taking a look at, and amazon had a sale on it, so I picked it up, despite my misgivings.

I think the publisher does the book a disservice by making it seem more generic than it really is.  For one thing, the cover screams "generic urban fantasy."  The jacket copy reads like another tough-guy urban fantasy.  But the actual book is not so typical.  Ray Lilly, the protagonist, is pretty  is squeamish and vomits when confronted with violence.  In addition, in a genre filled with powerful heroes (Harry Dresden, John Taylor), Ray is just a sidekick, and an expendable one at that.

My major beef with the book is that it constantly alludes to a back story between the two major characters, but leaves it completely opaque.  This is clearly just sequel fodder, which is just annoying.

I was listening to a lecture on literary analysis, and the best thing about reading literary analysis is that it can inspire you to re-read a book, or in this case a short story.  The lecturer was talking about Joyce's use of symbolism in "The Dead," a story that I've talked about before.  My feelings about the story haven't changed particularly, so I won't rehash them (I'm a little less sanguine about Gabriel's chances of changing than I was, but I still think "The Dead" is the most optimistic story in the collection).  But it's interesting to see the craft in Joyce's use of light & dark, snow, and open spaces.  Joyce uses light and darkness to separate Gabriel from his wife, as well as to show Gabriel's isolation from others.

The snow, of course, links everyone together -- Ireland is a metonomy for the world, I think.  This goes without saying, except it gives me a chance to quote the beautiful ending:

It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I have changed my idea that the story is told from Gabriel's viewpoint.  The beginning is told from the maid's perspective: "LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."  Gabriel would never make such a solecism as "literally run off her feet."  In the first half of the story we whirl in and out of Gabriel's consciousness.  We have to see from outside sometimes, so that we can have a foretaste of his epiphany when he sees himself in the mirror.